


Roadside Wake

by Truth



Category: Weiß Kreuz
Genre: Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-27
Updated: 2007-01-27
Packaged: 2017-10-14 06:48:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Truth/pseuds/Truth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This story falls, chronologically, before Christmas.  <b>Read <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/146538">Christmas</a> first</b>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Roadside Wake

There are two kinds of bars in this part of the world. The first kind is where you go to socialize, to drink and to possibly pick up someone to have bad sex with in the back of your truck or, if you’re really lucky, back at their place. There’s loud music and louder patrons and the only thing worse than the music is the insincere laughter of the drunk who is going to go home with someone they’ve never seen before in their life.

‘If there’s a God, they’ll all contract some horrible venereal disease and die in incredible, mind-rotting pain.’

The second kind of bar is the kind where you go to drink yourself into liver failure and conversation is generally limited to ‘keep ‘em coming’. There’s still music, but it’s kept to a level that won’t turn the stomach of the sullen patrons, unless they have a grave dislike of the sort of dispirited love song churned out by depressed men in ten gallon hats crooning for the woman who done stomped on their hearts.

Schuldig, enthusiastic supporter of the hope of burning death for the line-dancing, drunken and empty people at the first sort of place, definitely preferred the second. The great American Midwest was hardly the land of straight-laced temperance that peopled seemed to insist on thinking it, but it was still far easier to find the first sort of drinking establishment than the second.

He’d managed, however, one leg wrapped around the base of the old-fashioned bar-stool, old leather marked with dark stains and the occasional cigarette stain. A bottle of whiskey sat on the bar before him, and a single glass with ice, half full of alcohol, rested beside the bottle. One elbow propped against the bar, breathing in the strange mix of old cigarette smoke, alcohol fumes and the faint, unpleasant smell of the serious drunk, he turned the glass slowly on the bar as he waited.

This was the third night he’d found himself at the bar, nursing a single glass of whiskey. The bartender hadn’t asked any questions and he hadn’t volunteered any answers. When Schuldig finished the bottle he’d be through waiting, but he’d given himself that long – sitting in a tiny, ill-lit bar at the ass end of nowhere, hundreds of miles from the nearest real city.

Listening to the mournful strains of the latest paen to love lost coming from the old radio at the far end of the bar and nearly drowned out by the rattle of the air conditioning, Schuldig reached for another cigarette and debated having a second glass. He caught a stray thought from one of the silent alcoholics in a nearby cramped booth and hid a twisted smile.

‘You’ve no idea how right you are….’

Schuldig didn’t belong in this place, one lingering drink every afternoon at the ramshackle little bar, surrounded by people drinking themselves slowly to death with the grim determination of those who’d seen the light at the end of the tunnel and discovered it was an on-coming train.

The image of the on-rushing train didn’t bother Schuldig. In a one-on-one collision of that sort, you’d barely have time to realize was happening before you were dead. He found his fingers brushing the bottle and frowned at them. A long moment passed before he drew them away. Finishing what was left in his glass, he set it on the bar, hearing the ice clink dimly as the static-choked singer went on about the clear blue eyes of his lost beloved.

Leaving a bill on the bar beside the bottle, Schuldig quit the bar to stand, squinting, in the late afternoon sun.

‘Not today….’

It was half an hour from the small, folksy motel where Schuldig was staying to the scrubby little roadside bar, longer if the broken-down rental car decided to be difficult about starting in the summer heat, as it often did. It took Schuldig to and fro, however, and that’s all he really needed.

He picked up a meal at the take-out window of the local Dairy Queen and ate it while watching the news, stretched out on the dingy coverlet of his rented bed. Schuldig slept long and slept hard, waking the next morning to another long, summer day of nothing to do save kill time until he found himself again facing the same bottle of whiskey as the level of alcohol within slowly sank.

On the fifth day since choosing the run-down, roadside bar, Schuldig finished his whiskey and stared at the slowly melting ice cubes. He found himself again reaching for the bottle and, this time, didn’t resist. He poured himself a second glass, listening to the faint, dull clink of the ice; barely heard beneath the caterwauling of some woman telling some other woman that the man she’s stolen isn’t hers to keep. The bottle was set again on the bar and Schuldig stared at the whiskey still inside, wondering idly how much longer it would last.

‘Not long.’

It was a strangely oppressive thought and he downed a long swallow of whiskey before coming up for air. As he set the glass on the bar, Schuldig became aware of someone standing directly beside him. Too distracted to notice someone entering and walking toward him – and that was a _bad_ sign. He reached for his cigarettes, only to have a pale hand come down on them first and tweak them away. The hiss of breath through his teeth then was made of two parts anticipation and one relief.

“You’re late.”

The click of a lighter was his only answer and he turned to look up at the man standing beside him. If Schuldig’s long mane of orange hair and age had been enough to make him stand out drastically amongst the grey and dingy dregs of disappointed age, Farfarello was enough to take the entire scene into the realm of the surreal. He tossed the cigarettes back to Schuldig and chose a stool. Grimacing as the beaten-up seat wobbled beneath his weight, he didn’t echo Schuldig’s pose, but instead braced a booted foot against the bar.

“Two lines asking me to show up at a nameless bar in the middle of fucking nowhere for a drink doesn’t scream ‘emergency’ to me.” Farfarello gestured to the pudgy bartender and pointed a finger at Schuldig’s glass. Another glass was produced – without ice, after another gesture from Farfarello, and the bartender retreated.

It had been almost a year since they’d last met and, as Farfarello pointed out, an invitation for a drink wasn’t something to stir the blood – particularly given the locale. Schuldig took a cigarette for himself and lit it. Farfarello hadn’t changed particularly. He’d let his hair go back to its natural color, always somewhat jarring after years of bleached white. To Schuldig, it always seemed as though Farfarello had simply taken to dying his hair in blood. He watched as the last of the whiskey was poured into Farfarello’s glass and thought, for a moment, of fate.

“Halfway across the country,” Farfarello said, taking a swallow from his own glass and ignoring the glare from the bartender at the position of his foot, “for a drink. And ‘You’re late’ is all you have to say?”

“Not all.” Schuldig flicked his own lighter closed and leaned one elbow against the bar. “But it’s a start.”

“It’d better be close to a finish as well.” Farfarello glanced around, catching more than one patron giving him a funny look, probably more for the fact that he was obviously wide awake and not intending to drink himself insensible than for his missing eye. “No one in their right mind would be caught drinking in this pit for pleasure.”

“Mmmm.” Schuldig made a noncommittal noise and drained his own glass. “You’re here.”

“I’m not drinking for pleasure.” Farfarello eyed the bottle and then looked at the bartender. “You didn’t buy _this_ here.”

“I’m not interested in poisoning myself,” Schuldig assured him dryly, fighting the urge to laugh. “I brought it with me.” It wouldn’t be the first time he’d brought his own alcohol into a dive and it took very little effort to convince the management that they’d sold it to him.

Farfarello nodded. “Did you bring another bottle?”

“I bought two. There’s one back at my motel.” A confession of sorts, and Schuldig waited for Farfarello to do the math.

Another long swallow of whiskey and Farfarello set his glass back on the bar. “… a glass a day?”

“You’re late,” Schuldig repeated, picking up the empty bottle and examining it.

“Late for _what_?” Farfarello asked, irritation obvious. He turned on the bar stool, ignoring the wobble, and gave Schuldig a hard look. “Halfway across the fucking country for a few glasses of whiskey? I find it hard to believe you wanted a drink so desperately that you decided to crawl into the first squalid dive you came across and sent me a message to join you because you wanted to drag me down with you and waited, what, almost a week for me to turn up?”

Schuldig didn’t move for a long moment, attention half on Farfarello and half on the empty bottle as the radio swung into a surprisingly upbeat song with fiddles involving, ironically, drinking to forget. When he did speak, it wasn’t to answer Farfarello’s question. Turning his head just enough to watch Farfarello’s expression, he said, “It’s more of a wake, really.”

There was silence at their end of the bar for several long minutes as the fiddle scraped in the background, more rock than country and almost as out of place in the dingy bar as the two men and their whiskey. Schuldig waited silently for a response, watching Farfarello’s face as surprise faded to mild irritation and expression disappeared altogether.

“I’m going to want that second bottle.” Farfarello took the last of his drink at a single swallow. “You drive.”

Schuldig didn’t ask how Farfarello had gotten there in the first place or how he was planning on getting back. He rose from his stool and headed silently for the door, Farfarello stalking at his heels. As the door closed behind them, cutting out the scraping of the fiddle, Schuldig hid a faint smile. The bartender was staring confusedly at the empty bottle, wondering how it had arrived… with no memory at all of the man who’d spent five days waiting patiently at the end of his bar or the stranger who’d finally appeared to meet him.

“Like an evil spirit,” he said aloud, glancing back at Farfarello with a faint smile. “All it takes is a brief message of summoning and an offering of alcohol.”

“ _Good_ alcohol,” Farfarello corrected him, not looking terribly amused at the comparison. “And I’m not so interested in the offering as I am in the delivering.”

With a laugh, Schuldig escorted him to the slightly rusted car that he’d been using for transport. Ignoring the tart, disparaging comment from Farfarello’s direction, he slid behind the wheel. Lack of air conditioning meant that they drove with the windows down; the hot, heavy wind of a late summer afternoon cooling only in movement.

The ride was silent, enlivened only by Farfarello’s single attempt to find music which lasted only as long as it took him to discover that the only station he could pick up which wasn’t country and western was currently airing a selection of sermons, all promising the listening sinners a fast trip to Hell. The remainder of the trip passed in relative silence, mainly because Schuldig’s laughter was more or less noiseless.

Farfarello didn’t have anything positive to say about the motel, either, not that he said anything at all. They knew each other well enough that Schuldig could tell exactly what he wasn’t saying and was still laughing when he opened the door to his room.

Glancing around at the faded pink of once red checked curtains and the sun-bleached spread on the bed, Farfarello finally spoke. “No amount of whiskey is worth this.”

“You’d prefer that I’d invited you to drink in some pub in the ass-end of Belfast and taken you back to my tourist hotel with the mini bar?”

Farfarello didn’t dignify that with a response, nor did Schuldig expect one. Two minutes later, Farfarello sprawled on the bed with a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, watching Schuldig pour himself a glass of whiskey.

“Why?”

There was no need for elaboration. Schuldig turned to look at him, movement sliding into a helpless shrug. “Two weeks ago, I found myself in a street I’d never seen before, in front of a strange house, looking for the keys to the front door.” Silence greeted this confession and Schuldig continued. “Two days later, I found myself on my way to pick up my daughter from her day care.”

Farfarello stretched to put his glass on the floor, frowning. “Daughter? That’s rich. and that’s why you’re out in the middle of fucking nowhere, surrounded by drunks? Trouble with keeping other people out of your head?”

Schuldig shook his head. “It’s gone past that. It’s not that I can’t keep them out… it’s that I’m starting lose the line between which set of impulses are mine and which are ‘them’.”

“So what are you going to do about it? You can’t hide in middle America forever. You’ll end up serving potluck church dinners or calling square dances.”

“I can’t hide from it,” Schuldig agreed, turning the glass of whiskey in his hands. “It’s too late for that.”

Silence again, welling up between them like a cool spring and drowning any trace of good humor. When Farfarello finally spoke, the words seemed flat and far away. “So that’s it, then.”

“That’s it.” As calmly as if he weren’t talking about a certain descent into madness, delusion mixing with reality in a communicable Alzheimer’s, one that would begin to contaminate everyone that he touched. Schuldig took a swallow of his whiskey and sighed. “I need to die and I thought you should be invited.”

“A wake with a single mourner, just me and the soon-to-be corpse.” The bitterness of the words was no less than Schuldig had expected.

“Well, to the wake, yes.” Schuldig held up his glass in a mock toast. “Also to the death.”

A moment of silence fell, so cold that it froze the water that was slowly rising to drown them both and Schuldig decided that thinking in metaphors was almost as bad as simply losing his mind.

“You know my thoughts on suicide.” Farfarello’s tone was as brittle as the silence that shattered around them.

Schuldig did, and knew that the anger Farfarello displayed was fueled by something completely different, unspoken and almost unrecognized, that still lay between them. “I’m more interested in your thoughts on murder,” he murmured, taking another drink.

“… you want me to kill you.” There was almost relief in his voice as Farfarello relaxed marginally.

“It has to be done right the first time,” Schuldig told him, lips twisting into a smile. “I know you take pride in your work.”

“You want me to kill you.” Farfarello’s eye narrowed as he repeated the words and Schuldig could read the conflicting emotions reflected there. “I’m not a cheap date.”

Schuldig’s smile was almost genuine. “I wouldn’t ask you to do anything that wasn’t strictly professional – or to work for free.”

“You’re going to _pay_ me to kill you?” Dark amusement faded to affronted surprise as Farfarello shifted on the bed, boots making a dull thud as they hit the floor. His displeasure was obvious as he turned a look of scorn on Schuldig.

“I couldn’t afford what you’d charge,” Schuldig assured him, leaning back against the scarred desk that someone had squeezed into the room in the misguided belief that such a piece of furniture would allow them to list the motel as having facilities for the business traveler. There’d never been any question of offering Farfarello money for this. It would turn an intimate act into nothing more than blood-tinged prostitution. “No… we’ll do this with barter.”

“Barter?” Farfarello gave a short bark of laughter. “You don’t have anything that I want.”

There was another silence as Schuldig held his now half-empty glass in another silent toast before throwing his head back and swallowing the contents at one go. “That,” he assured Farfarello softly, eyes glinting with equal parts gentle malice and opportunity, “is where you are wrong.”


End file.
